Critical Essay by John Middleton Murry

SOURCE: "Mr. Sassoon's War Verses," in his The Evolution of an Intellectual, R. Cobden-Sanderson, 1920, pp. 75-84.

Murry was a renowned English literary critic whose books include The Problem of Style (1922) and Keats and Shakespeare (1925). In the the following analysis, originally written in July, 1918, Murry asserts that Sassoon's work in Counter-Attack and Other Poems is "not poetry. " He faults the war verse in the volume because it fails to provide a contrast to the chaotic atmosphere of battle and because it has a distinctly prose-like quality.

It is the fact, not the poetry, of Mr. Sassoon that is important. When a man is in torment and cries aloud, his cry is incoherent. It has neither weight nor meaning of its own. It is inhuman, and its very inhumanity strikes to the nerve of our hearts. We long to silence...